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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27734440">Void of Guilt</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tauriian/pseuds/Tauriian'>Tauriian</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hermitcraft RPF, Minecraft (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon-Typical Violence, Child Neglect, Death, Fluff, Guilt, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, I WAS TIRED, I skipped the entire yakuza arc in yhs, I'll add more tags when I think of them, Ignore the parts where it’s obvious that I skipped some episodes, Implied/Referenced Abuse, M/M, Minecraft Evo - Freeform, Minecraft Evolution - Freeform, Murder, Reflection, Self-Reflection, Violence, Watcher Grian, Yandere High School - Freeform, evo - Freeform, i just dipped, i think, idk man, its like. sprinkled in there, lots of griangst yummy yummy, tokyo soul, yhs</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:34:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,517</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27734440</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tauriian/pseuds/Tauriian</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Grian thinks about his past. He thinks that, maybe, he wasn't the best of people. With the lives of countless innocents on his hands, he's not sure how he didn't realize that sooner.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Charles | Grian &amp; Sam England, Charles | Grian/Taurtis</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>88</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Void of Guilt</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Grian character study no one asked for lol. just wanted to tackle his character from a different angle than most people do so enjoy reading this ?? i also had no clue what to title this</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It takes Grian becoming a watcher for him to realize he’s a bad person.</p><p>He isn't sure whether calling himself a bad person is an overstatement or an understatement, but having so much time with no one who truly cares about him made him realize some things about his past. He was selfish, he realized. He only did things for self preservation and the preservation of his friends, no matter who else had to die because of it. Despite this strong feeling of wanting to protect himself, he was destructive towards himself and others. He didn't care who got hurt, as long as he and Taurtis were safe in the end. Did protecting him and his closest friend make him a bad person?</p><p>Definitely not a saint, Grian thought.</p><p>With time alone in the void, because he would always be alone as a watcher despite the others, he was given far too much time to think about all this. He found himself dwelling on things he never wanted to think of again, but maybe that was for the better. He needed to confront himself sooner or later, anyway. So one night, as he sat staring into the void, he did.</p><p>It all started in highschool. His parents were divorced, neglectful, leaving him with a butler and far too much free time. He went to visit his old childhood friends in Japan for halloween, excited to see them again despite recently seeing them no less than a week ago. He got there, being pulled into a tight hug by his headphone wearing bud. He decided, at that moment, to not unpack the reason blush spread across his face at the gesture. He joined them on their wacky trick or treating misadventures, of which he remembers not being too out of the ordinary. Or maybe he was so used to chaos he didn't even remember what was out of the ordinary in the first place. They were just goofin’ and gaffin’, in the words of a certain cruel rabbit eared boy. He remembers them exploring the haunted school, getting scared half to death from the ghosts that resided there. Honestly, it was a pretty bad decision, but at least he got bragging rights of chickening out last- and he impressed the cute enby he was interested in. what happened next was worse, anyway.</p><p>He has hazy, panicked memories of Sam stabbing Taurtis in the stomach. Grian tried desperately to hold him up, to support him as Taurtis bled out on their way back to the bus stop. They climbed into the bus, Sam wishing Grian a safe trip back to england. He didn’t seem to notice, or care about, his bleeding best friend. Taurtis had insisted on driving as Grian kept telling him it was an awful idea, he was hurt, he was gonna die if they couldn’t get him medical help.</p><p>Thank god Taurtis crashed the bus, or Grian wouldn’t have been able to drag him to the hospital. He tells Sam the news the next day, about what happened to Taurtis, and there’s an immediate shift in the unstable rabbit. His ears twitch, and then he smiles, far too wide for someone who just found out that their best friend was hospitalized. What Sam forced Grian to do next will forever haunt him.</p><p>Taurtis’s clothes didn't exactly fit very well. Taurtis was tall and lanky, Grian was short and chubby (Sam loved to poke cruel fun at him for his weight), so it wasn’t very comfortable based on that alone. It becomes less comfortable as Sam and his pink haired murderer of a girlfriend force him to pretend to be Taurtis, too. He remembers the blade at his throat when he refused to go along with the delusion, so he stopped trying to fight them. It got to the point that Sam truly believed Grian was Taurtis. Grian would never forget the feeling of sobbing and sobbing in the shed as plastic was forced down his throat, screaming for it to stop.</p><p>Maybe that’s when Grian snapped, or at least it was the start of it. He was thrust into a nightmare, where his friend had gone insane and the other was hospitalized. He figured out early on that going along with Sam was the only way to keep himself alive. His parents didn’t care and Taurtis was a pushover, so his mind was made up. He would do anything to keep himself and the people that mattered to him alive and well, no matter the cost. He wasn’t going to be vulnerable again, not like that.</p><p>Then, he killed someone for the first time. He remembers the adrenaline when he killed the Yakuza boss, the blood on his hands. He remembers being scared, not because he killed someone but because he didn’t feel all that remorseful about it. There was a twinge of guilt, but it was easily smothered. It was the first time he had ever been scared of himself. He tries not to feel bad about it.</p><p>More shenanigans happen in a blur, he witnesses Sam’s girlfriend kill multiple people and then herself, and he’s placed into a witness protection program with Sam, Taurtis and Dom. After accidentally being sent to Canada somehow, he reunites with his friends in Tokyo, Japan. They’re still just as weird and destructive, so he plays the straight man to their trio. Maybe not a <em> straight </em>straight man, but a straight man nonetheless.</p><p>Grian gets along with Sam now, but that doesn’t mean he likes him. Grian is there for Taurtis and Taurtis alone, Sam knows that. He’s still too oblivious to notice Grian and Taurtis holding hands whenever they get the chance, or Taurtis more often than not coming from Grian’s room in the morning, but that’s probably for the better.</p><p>Sam locks him in a closet for a few days, and he takes some time to question if his parents just didn’t realize he was gone or didn’t care. It doesn’t matter either way. He’s let out and, Apparently, clone shenanigans happen while he was in there. his friend comes to visit shortly after, and then Taurtis goes missing one night. Sam doesn’t seem worried, and despite Grian’s feeling of panic setting in when Taurtis is gone for days on end, he doesn’t say anything. He's just glad it isn't a repeat of what happened last time Taurtis was absent. </p><p>While Taurtis is gone, the police hire Grian and Sam to take care of aliens that have invaded. Grian briefly questions how he got to this point before accepting it and going on with the mission. They kill a few innocent people in the crossfire, and Grian doesn’t feel bad about it. It was on accident, they at least stopped the alien invasion. So what if some people had to die in order for everyone else to be safe? It’s normal to not feel bad, Grian tells himself. So he doesn’t feel bad about it.</p><p>It takes him 24 hours until there’s innocent blood on his hands again. The mafia tells them they have Taurtis, and that he and Sam have to pay them to get him back. It’s Grian’s idea to rob a store and take hostages. They shoot a man, steal his masks for a disguise and then leave him for dead in an alleyway. They break into the store, start stealing everyone’s money, and Grian kills a girl around his age to use her untimely death as an example. He doesn’t stop to think about the girls life, her family and friends, the murder is a spur of the moment plan. It's to get Taurtis back, he tells himself. He doesn’t feel bad.</p><p>When the police come, Grian ends up killing a good few of them too. It’s all just self defense, right? He’s trying to get his boyfriend back, the police were firing at him- this is okay, he ressures himself as he stares down at the corpse of the second police officer he killed. Sam and Grian go to prison, obviously, but they’re let out a few minutes after they’re forced in because the head officer offers to help them find Taurtis. Grian kills more people when he’s at the mafia base, but they’re not innocents this time. So he doesn't feel bad about that, either.</p><p>When they get Taurtis back, Grian feels all his bundled up anxiety he didn’t even know he had vanish. That night, the night of the day Taurtis came back, Grian pulls him into a hug on his bed. There’s mumblings of “I missed you”, and they don’t leave each other's arms for the rest of the night. Grian concludes all the violence was worth seeing Taurtis again.</p><p>Not a very long amount of time later they’re involved in weird shit again, as is typical of the problem trio. They’re chased by a robot version of their former gym teacher, someone they saw die right in front of them. He claims to be there to exterminate Sam, and soon enough the trio finds themselves on an alien spaceship. They massacre everyone on there, all of them much weaker and some innocent, killed without them doing any harm. Grian doesn’t ever pause or waver, he just kills them and moves on. They’re aliens, they’re not human, and so he doesn’t feel bad about it.</p><p>More havoc happens after that, car crashes and killing minions. He doesn’t feel bad about that, either. The minions are annoying and anyone in their right mind should agree with him. Then, he’s left in Canada again for a few days. He doesn’t know how this keeps happening, but when he gets back Sam and Taurtis had stolen a large amount of microwaves and TVs in his absence. He isn't even surprised. They meet a new girl that day, her name is Aphmau and Grian finds her annoying. They spend the day together at school, getting into typical shenanigans, and then she reads a spell wrong and sends them to the realm of Cthulhu. Of course she does.</p><p>A few more weird monsters die, and Cthulhu tells them the only way they’re getting out is if the person that brought them there is sacrificed. Without a moment's hesitation, Grian grabs the unsuspecting girl by her arm and throws her in. the shock from Sam and Taurtis makes him feel worse than the murder itself did, especially when Sam asks him if he regretted what he’d done. Grian just wanted to get them out- and that was the only way to do so. So what if someone had to die? He didn’t know that girl for more than a day, why should he feel bad? He knew Sam was worse than him- he had tormented him and gaslit him for far too long. Sam was so much worse than him, so he shouldn’t feel bad for the murder that he committed to save everyone when Sam had committed more harmful crimes. It was self preservation, this is what the world taught him to be like, he had no other choice. He decided it was no fault of him, but instead the fault of the environment he was put in. so he didn’t feel bad about it.</p><p>But nothing that happened after that could compare to the destruction of the very world they’d lived in their whole lives. There they were, three kids no older than 18, gifted with immortality. They were abandoned in their house floating in the void, forced to think about what they’d done for the rest of eternity. This was their final reward for their destructive behavior. Grian remember’s watching Sam go even more mad, seeing what physical wounds he could inflict on the other to test whether or not they’d die from them. Despite the pain, they never did. Grian vowed that he would find a way out. He vowed that as he held a crying Taurtis in his arms.</p><p>And one day, inconspicuously, a command block appeared in his room. He didn’t know what it was at first, but he figured it out eventually. He kept it a secret from Sam and Taurtis at first as he messed around with it, and then one day, much to his shock, he found out how to world jump with it. He was ecstatic, he finally found a way for him and Taurtis to escape the hell of the void and make a better life for themselves. So, he told taurtis about it, and they both agreed to leave together. They left Sam in the void, doomed to go insane for the rest of eternity. Grian didn't feel bad about it.</p><p>So, he and Taurtis were finally free. They world hopped a bit, trying to find the perfect place to stay, and Grian met many friends along the way. Eventually he started his own server, inviting some of the people he met and getting taurtis in there too with his summoning platform. For some odd reason, it was stuck in an old version, but things were fine for a while. He tried to think about Sam as little as possible. He had nightmares, but he shoved it all away. He didn’t want to reflect on what happened and what he did back then, he didnt wanna think about it. Sam was a monster, and that’s all he needed to know. He just wanted to forget all of that ever happened. Grian, to distract himself from his thoughts and memories, would play so-called “harmless” pranks on his friends, usually involving lots of TNT. it was fine, though! They could just respawn, since this world lacked permadeath. It never occurred to Grian that dying still hurt, just that he wasn’t actually killing anyone for good. He isn’t bad for having a bit of fun, right? He shouldn’t feel bad about it.</p><p>And then the watchers come into the picture, and Grian hated them from the start. They portrayed themselves as angels to the evolutionists, giving them gifts and challenges and warnings. Controlling them all like it was just some sick game. Grian didn’t need anyone in control of his life again, so he actively defied the watchers as much as he possibly could. He wanted them gone, he just wanted to live a nice life with his friends and his boyfriend where there were no greater forces at play. He was sick of being controlled.</p><p>It feels like it's too soon when the watchers decide to take him with them. Grian is kicking and screaming as he’s dragged away, screaming at someone to help him, to bring him back to his friends. The watchers make Grian one of them, much to his disdain, and he isn’t allowed to go back with his friends, though he’s allowed to watch them. He ignores the watcher’s demands, doesn’t listen to what they tell him to do, and he’s punished for it. It's a cycle that repeats, and he doesn’t know why the watchers even keep him there. They claim that he should be grateful to them, for they’re the ones that left the command block for him to find. He doesn’t thank them for it once. One day, after a particular moment of disobedience, the watchers finally snap. The look in their one too many eyes is horrific as they tell Grian in a sing-song voice what's about to happen, what a disgraceful boy like him deserves. Grian, to his grief stricken horror, is forced to watch Evo get destroyed. He's forced to watch his friends die.</p><p>He's screaming, sobbing as he sees the world burn, the ending of a world a familiar sight. But this time, people he cared about were getting hurt, this time it actually affected him. He struggled against his bindings to the void until by some miraculous strength, maybe an adrenaline rush, he breaks free. The second he’s out he teleports to the broken remains of the world he spent so long in, and before he can stop himself he's running towards the one person he wants to see the most. </p><p>He finds Taurtis collapsed on the ground, bleeding from a wound on his stomach. Grian’s head flashes with memories and he pushes them away. He rushes to Taurtis’s side, softly cupping his face in his hands. His eyes are open, he's breathing, but he looks so weak, so fragile with blood and tears covering his face, yet he still smiles. Grian remembers Taurtis begging not to die in a terrified voice and his own attempts to reassure him that he was going to live, he <em> had </em>to live, for heaven's sake Taurtis was all that he had left. He was sobbing into Taurtis’s chest, gripping the front of his shirt, pleading for him to stay, to please not go, he wouldn’t be able to go on if he was gone. Taurtis laughed weakly after a minute, seemingly accepting his fate, lifting a shaky hand to rest on the top of Grian’s head. Grian can remember the next words with perfect clarity.</p><p>“H-hey, Grian..? Y’know- Y’know I love you, r-right?”</p><p>And Grian was sobbing harder than he was before. They didn’t need to do this stupid last “I love you” thing, he told Taurtis through his sobs, because Taurtis wasn’t going to die. He couldn’t. Grian told him that if he died, he would kill Taurtis himself. Taurtis let out a weak, breathy chuckle, letting his head fall back as Grian screamed at him to open his eyes, vigorously shaking his limp friend. Suddenly, he felt an ice cold touch on his shoulder, and there one of the watchers was. They gripped him tightly, dragging him away from Taurtis’s corpse as he screamed and cried and fought with all his might to get back to the person he loved most in the world. Instead, he was returned to the familiar scenery of the void. In his grief stricken state, he couldn't bring himself to care about the punishment he got because of his escape. He remembers doing nothing for days on end, who knows how long, wishing for Taurtis, wishing for death, wishing for everything to end at once. He doesn’t remember that time very well. He feels responsible for the death Taurtis, and he remembers Sam constantly telling him he was responsible for every bad thing that happened to them, and the watchers simply echoed those statements.</p><p>He was able to escape back to his shattered world of Evo at one point, and his heart was stricken with grief. Everything had fallen apart, the foundation of the world's code was destroyed, and everything he had worked hard for was broken. Before he could stop himself, he went to the last place he saw taurtis, with a sense of false hope telling him that maybe, maybe Taurtis would be well and alive.</p><p>That foolish hope is all but crushed when he gets there. All that’s there is a pair of bloodied headphones and a single red rose. Grian collapses to his knees and breaks down sobbing. He cries and he cries and he cries for god knows how long until his eyes have dried up and he's clutching the headphones so hard they look like they might snap. He takes a deep breath, trying not to start the waterworks again, as he summons a flower pot and puts the single red rose in there. He slips the headphones and the rose into his cape, summons a portal, and then goes back to his room in the void. He doesn’t go back to Evo again.</p><p>And that’s where he’s left now, reflecting on his past. And that’s when he confirms with himself; he isn’t a good person, not by a long shot. He spent his highschool years getting harmed, abused by Sam, and in turn he learned the best way to get by was to harm others. And maybe some cases of murder were unavoidable, but he never felt bad for the corpses in front of him. He never stopped to think, to be empathetic and realize that these people had families and friends too. That they could’ve mattered to someone just as much as Taurtis mattered to him. Grian had always struggled with empathy, and maybe he always would, but now he knew how it felt to lose someone. It helped him realize what he’d subjected other people to. He moved his hands to wipe away the tears he didn’t even know he was crying, trying to repress a sob. There's a pang of loneliness and fear in his chest, aching and aching as he thinks of Taurtis, as he thinks of how Sam hurt him. He wishes he could apologize to the people he hurt, he wishes he could be better than the people who hurt him. So he isn’t a good person, he decided. Not yet. But maybe he could be. He clutches the flowerpot in his lap tightly.</p><p>Grian was a watcher when he realized he was a bad person.</p><p>And it's in hermitcraft where he learns to be better.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>anyway thats all. go listen to Epoch because i think thats a fitting song for grian. idfk man im tired af peace out. comments and kudos are appreciated uwu</p></blockquote></div></div>
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